


Slightly Variant Initial Conditions

by shiplizard



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Borrowed setting, Children's TV, Edutainment, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:52:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in the world of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/540102">Mr. Coulson's Technicolor Dreamhouse</a>, the story of how a brilliant nuclear engineering student with breathtaking anger management issues wound up working for the best kid's show on television.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Resume

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Mr. Coulson's Technicolor Dreamhouse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/540102) by [Not_You](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You). 



> WARNINGS: for mentions of violence and the depiction of a paranoid rage episode. 
> 
> NOTE: While [Not_You](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You) was awesome enough to give me the go ahead to write this and to look over in its rough prototype stages, this is not actually Dreamhouse canon. It's an AU of an AU, because we heard you like AUs. 
> 
> Kindly beta'd by Binz and Morticiamom, who put up with two or three rewrites like saints.

It’s not that Phil blames Angie for taking the new job. She’ll be earning more, actually working in industrial automation like she’d always hoped, she’ll have a much better benefits package than he could ever have afforded to give her, he’s very happy for her. He doesn’t even blame her for the short notice; her hiring was conditional on starting a large scale project immediately. 

It’s just that without an engineer, everyone’s too busy doing quick patchwork repairs and jury rigging the set so that it can make it through one more day of filming to actually sit down and look at job applications for a new engineer. Things are starting to go wrong faster than they can be fixed, and Angry Sock has been doing a lot of emergency guest spots. They need a new pair of hands now, not later. 

Ideally, he’d be doing this with Nick and Natasha, the other two core members of the show, but they’ve barely had time to speak with each other-- instead, he’s got a pile of resumes with colored post-it notes on them and little notes from the other two. There’s green for ‘top pick’; yellow for ‘maybe’, red for ‘no’, and taped-on scraps of paper that have _green_ or _red_ written on them for ‘we ran out of post-it notes at eleven at night and said fuck it.’ 

Phil lets himself dream, briefly, that _Dreamhouse_ will get off the ground enough, be stable enough that they’ll have almost normal working hours and he won’t have to interview everyone himself, or at least look over resumes at quarter to midnight. It’s a beautiful thought. 

Then he takes a drink of black coffee and starts sorting. 

Double greens go into a pile to definitely interview with only a cursory glance; if the applicants meet Natasha’s standards and don’t trigger Nick’s disapproval too strongly, he’ll trust that they’re a probable good fit. Double reds and yellow-reds get put aside to be discarded with about as much deliberation. Everything else goes into the pile that he’ll actually have to read in depth, and he’s most of the way down the stack before he hits one that brings him to a stop. 

This resume has a red post-it from Nick, with just the words _hell no_ written in his precise script; Natasha gave it a green, and her comment, writing cramped and angular, is _suicidally honest. must know more._

He sets aside the unsorted resumes for a while, and pulls the desk lamp a little closer, skimming the cover letter and resume and seeing instantly why Nick rejected it out of hand. Banner, Robert Bruce has been working since he was in high school, about ten years, and his past employment record is at least sixteen or seventeen entries long. This is a man who cannot hold a job if it has a leash attached. His educational record, too, is a little mystifying-- he got a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Culver about four years ago, with honors, and there’s nothing else. But then, he held a series of temp jobs at the university up until last year. That says ‘grad student’ to Phil, but why isn’t that listed, and what’s he doing in New York? 

Banner’s not unqualified-- his long history of electrical and maintenance work speaks to an ability to work with his hands, to cope with emergencies and understand how things fit together, and he’s had a few robotics courses in college that mean he’ll at least know a servo from a relay (which, frankly, is more than Phil does.) But his resume is a disaster. He’s unhireable. 

And he knows it. He hasn’t tried to disguise it, has just bared his bleeding job record to the world with a polite, nearly resigned cover letter like a bandage over it. And that’s why Natasha is interested. Honestly, Phil is interested too. 

Phil stares at the resume for a while, and then squares his jaw and throws it in with the double greens. Definite interview.

* * *

The next day, he breaks procedure a little bit, using the lunch hour to call his mysterious applicant’s references. Usually he’d wait until after the interview, but he needs the whole story here. 

Everyone’s accounts are pretty much the same, old employers and old landlords: Banner, Robert Bruce (Bruce, they call him, never Robert) is a good kid. Bright, brilliant, hardworking, and always fired for one of two reasons. Either he took too many mental health days-- and he never lied about being sick that any of his employers know of, always scrupulously honest about why he couldn’t come in-- or he didn’t take enough mental health days. 

Great kid. Unemployable with a temper like that. 

Bruce’s ex-college advisor confirms Phil’s hunch; he was working on a Masters degree, in Nuclear Chemistry of all things, on his way to being the university’s big scholarship success story. Then...

“It wasn’t a bad fight, just some rival sports fans being loud in a bar. But there was shoving, and he got caught in the middle of it, and he had one of his-” the professor stopped. “He had an episode.” 

The euphemistic episode was a sudden explosion of violence, almost mindless, indiscriminate-- and that night, one student (the young man who’d shoved Bruce around) had wound up with a broken arm, a handful of others injured before they could get out of his way, and the damage to the bar was so severe that an insurance inspector coming in afterward had assumed it had been done with a sledgehammer. 

The expulsion was a foregone conclusion, and so was the involuntary psychiatric confinement. The student and the bar owner didn’t press charges-- and settled out of court for the ruinous hospital and repair bills.

Phil fills in the rest for himself; Bruce got out of the state as soon as he was out of the hospital, trying to find somewhere where he wasn’t infamous to pick up a little work. Too ashamed to lean on family, too stubborn to give up, he found his way to New York somehow and grounded here, stuck in a churn of temporary positions that don’t pay enough to get him a better situation but pay more than living on the road. 

He’s going to have to check himself. He’s already too invested in Banner and he hasn’t even met the kid yet.

* * *

Banner is one of the last of the interviewees, and one of Dreamhouse’s last hopes for a really good engineer. Things haven’t been going amazingly: they’ve had a few ambitious young people who want to use this as a very brief stepping stone into a career in industry automation-- Phil respects the outside-of-the-box thinking, but needs someone who’s going to stay long enough to actually complete some of their projects, not an Angie 2.0 who’ll leave them when the next well-deserved opportunity comes along. Besides, the ‘genius visionary of puppets’ bar was set high by a college intern they had for the summer a couple years ago; after Tony, just about anyone who thinks they’ve got the next big idea is going to be a bit of a disappointment. Not that Phil would ever tell the little smart-alec that. 

Then they’ve had men and women with a long, solid history of maintenance and building electrical, but no grounding for the finicky work of animatronics. He hates slipping them into the ‘probably no’ pile more than the young bucks, and mentally puts them highest on the to-call list when the do fill the position-- it’s easier to know and start looking again than to hang on to hope. 

It’s not all unpleasant-- some of the applicants have kids who are fans of the show; he winds up signing autographs, to his bemusement. So does Nick, even more bemused, scribbling out cards dedicated both to parents and to the odd firebrand-in-training child. Phil smiles quietly to himself, because Nick off guard is rare and special, and Nick coaxed into doing impromptu Angry Sock rants for fans is possibly the best thing he’s ever seen-- and he’s not on camera, so he has the rare luxury of hiding in the storage room to laugh himself sick. 

The first sign that this interview will be different comes from Natasha-- an hour before Banner is due, she disentangles herself from the set breakdown with effortless poise and comes to lurk near the storage room they’ve converted into an office. She’s holding a clipboard. He’s never seen her hold a clipboard before, but she takes to it well, imbuing it with great and terrible authority. It transforms her into something foreign and terrible, like a censor, or an accountant. 

“Give him a chance, Tasha,” he pleads. 

“I will,” she says, soft and uninflected “I just want to see what kind of guy he is.” 

Banner turns out to be the kind of guy who shows up fifteen minutes early, is polite to people he thinks are accountants, and waits quietly without fidgeting on the folding chairs set off to the side. He doesn’t go out to look at the set breakdown, which is a mark against him in the unwritten ‘Mr. Coulson’s Technicolor Dreamhouse Book of Nonstandard Interviewing Techniques’-- Phil’s always looking for people who are curious and interested, always selfishly hoping that he’ll find that person who falls in love with the place as much as the rest of them already have. 

Bruce isn’t going to be that person. He isn’t willing to open up to the show-- to open up, period. His posture is all but a cringe and he seems afraid to touch anything. He’s no linebacker but he’s square and faintly muscular, and he’s trying to fold himself into the space of a smaller man, a non-threatening person who doesn’t have intermittent rage episodes. His job-interview suit is a little too short in the sleeves of both jacket and shirt, ironed to within an inch of its life, has already seen more washing than the cheap fabric was ready to take. 

“Robert Banner?” Phil says softly, trying not to feel too much like he’s approaching a skittish animal, like Banner might just bolt under a table if he puts a foot wrong. “It’s ten-till, but we can start the interview early, if you like.” 

“That would be great, thank you.” Banner gives him his best attempt at a winning smile, and solidifies himself in Phil’s brain as ‘puppy waiting to be adopted.’ Maybe he should have Nick take this one, because he mostly wants to give the man a hug and take him into their makeshift green room for cookies. It doesn’t speak well for his ability to give an unbiased interview. 

“Do you prefer Robert, or Bruce?” Phil asks as he leads them back towards his office. He knows already, but it seems polite to ask, to give him a chance to set the terms here, not his old employers. The smile doesn’t waver, but it does solidify a little.

“Bruce, thank you.” 

Phil smiles reassuringly back and makes a mental note: _doesn’t like to be called Robert._

“You can call me Phil or Mister Coulson, whichever makes you comfortable. Though ‘Mister Coulson’ feels more like a job description than a name these days,” he offers in exchange. 

Bruce gives him a sympathetic little chuckle, and Phil sees the first spark of something surprising. Bruce is good at sympathy, in a raw awkward way. Maybe Phil’s jumping the gun, but he thinks Bruce is sincere, even sweet, if you can get to him. And if he doesn’t explode. 

They get to the office and Phil tries not skid to a stop in the doorway-- the stacks of paper and file-boxes full of puppet parts that have eaten it have been cleared away enough to make room for a third chair, all in the the two minutes since he left.

“Hello, Bruce,” Natasha says, coming from nowhere, dressed in a clean black button shirt that hasn’t been through set breakdown; she’s carrying the menacing clipboard again. “My name’s Natasha. I’ll be sitting in on the interview today.” Her voice is chipper, animated, implies that this is SOP around here, and Phil’s eyebrow implies _what the hell, Natasha?_ right back at her when Bruce isn’t looking.

“It’s great to meet you, Natasha,” Bruce says, meeting her eyes and not her breasts, looking a little intimidated but not precisely threatened.

“Can I get you something before we start? Water?” Natasha asks casually, and Bruce shakes his head. 

“No thank you, ma’am.” 

Phil watches her taking her own notes in her head, isn’t sure if ‘ma’am’ is a good or bad thing in her estimation. She doesn’t offer any other input, and Phil is relieved: people-person Natasha might throw him completely off his game. 

They get down to the standard and not-so-standard interview questions, and Phil starts to like Bruce almost immediately. He’s bright. He’s done the research, watched episodes of the show to prepare, and has a pretty good grasp on the amount of manual puppetry (a lot) to electrical gizmos (a few). He doesn’t have Tony’s knack for machines, but he’s done some robotics work for college and has a few interesting ideas about automated set pieces. He starts to open up a little more, to show an emotion besides exhaustion and wariness, starts actually talking to Phil. 

 

When Phil asks him to imagine a Dreamhouse segment of his own--a critical question for anyone applying for the main crew-- Bruce opens his mouth, pauses, looks at Phil, and obviously discards whatever acceptable and rehearsed interview-response just popped into his head. 

Bruce thinks for a long moment. Phil keeps his smile easy, not wanting him to feel pressed for time, and finally he says: “I, uh, I’d do something in the Negative Zone. About being angry.” Phil nods encouragingly. “That sometimes being angry is useful, but sometimes. Uh, sometimes it can make you feel strong, and you can start to like it, and feel like you’ve earned it because life is hard. But it really makes you sad. And it can hurt your friends. But you can’t earn something like that, and you can stop it. It’s your choice to stop it.” 

“That would be a good segment,” Phil says approvingly, and almost winces a little at the hope and suspicion that fight across Banner’s face. The more his reserved shell cracks, the more Phil can see a lonely young man who’s lost too much already and wants a home so badly. 

“Just one more question from me.” Phil looks down at his paperwork casually. “You may be working in proximity to children. In your own honest opinion, is that something you can safely handle?” 

He watches Bruce put on a polite smile and accept defeat.

“I have an anger disorder,” he says evenly. “I’ve been working with a doctor to find an effective mood stabilizer to reduce some of the effects, but sometimes new medications come with side effects. There would be periods of about a week after any medication change where I couldn’t be sure that I would... be good to be around children, where they could see or hear me.” 

“And how would you handle this, if you were working here?”

“Well, when I was having a medication change or feeling close to an episode, I’d tell the crew, and do as much work as I could from a private area, and come in before or after filming to do any big future projects.” 

“And if we needed a delicate repair on set, during filming, with a child audience?” 

“Then I would try to be aware of any sudden mood imbalances, and use coping methods until the issue was resolved.” 

That’s a pat psychiatrist-approved answer. Bruce doesn’t think he can guarantee it. 

What he’s asking is a hell of an imposition. Bruce knows it. This is a small show, they can’t afford to have an electronics expert who’s incapacitated for a week at a time. 

“Well, that’s all of my questions,” Phil says. “Do you have any for me?” 

“No. The medication issue covers it.” 

Phil rises from his seat, extends a hand. “We’ll call you when we’ve made our decision.” 

“Thanks so much for your time,” Bruce says, with a firm handshake. “Have a great day, Phil.” 

“You too, Bruce.” 

Phil walks him to the door, offers him a coffee, something, on the way out, and generally tries to stop feeling like he’s throwing a stray out into the rain. He tries to break himself of the impulse to adopt the man on principle all the way back to the office, where Natasha is perched thoughtfully on his desk. 

“This guy,” she says, her artificial perkiness banished back to the strange depths from whence it came. “He’s got a counselor. He’s working on it. I know the warning signs, we can put him on back-room projects before it gets bad. Between us we can wrangle him.” 

“Tasha, we can’t afford for things to go wrong like they did at Culver,” Phil sighs, arguing against himself as much as her, because he wants to fix it, wants to make a safe little place for Bruce Banner, wants to fix it as decisively as he can sort out Bill the Mostly Invisible Bird’s fears or Princess Tiye’s occasional monarchical dilemmas. 

“Nick’s already on board with him,” she says, and Phil scowls. They must both have been been in on this. 

“Nick didn’t want him in the first place.” 

“Nick talked with him on his way in. He changed his mind. We’ve got this.” 

“We don’t know that, Tasha.” 

“He was honest with you,” she says quietly. “He was ready to trust you after five minutes. Where else is he going to get that?” 

She knows that’s going to get him right in the soft center. “We’re all going to talk about this ganging up on me thing,” he says, as threateningly as he can-- which only makes Natasha smile. Her cheeks actually dimple when his glare is interrupted by his stomach growling-- he can feel that overcaffeinated low-blood sugar feeling coming on. “Over dinner,” he amends. 

“That diner, with the french toast,” she agrees, looking placid.


	2. Beginning

Bruce has been doing a fill-in shift as a drill press operator for a week, and he’s already starting to dream about it. They’re calming dreams, at least. Nothing goes wrong. It’s just images of whirling bits grinding down into steel plates and lifting back up, one after the other after the other. 

The phone rings and he cracks his eyes, seeing sunshine and then twisting out of his bed in a sudden panic because it must be noon, he’s missing classes-- 

His brain stutters because that isn’t true, does a hard left into ‘why didn’t the hospital staff wake me up for breakfast’ and then finally catches up to his tiny apartment and night shift, and he blinks for a half-second until the phone rings again and he dives for it. 

“Banner,” he says, trying not to sound too much like he’s still asleep. 

“Bruce, good morning. This is Phil Coulson,” a man’s voice greets him. “I’ll make this quick, we have to get back to filming in fifteen.” 

“Mister-- Phil?” He stares dumbly at the wall, squinting and wracking his brain. “...is something wrong?” He couldn’t have done too much damage at one interview. Could he have? 

There’s a moment of silence and then Phil’s voice comes back, kinder even than his already warm and avuncular ground state. “Nothing’s wrong. I wanted to know when you could start work.” 

“This temp job ends next Tuesday,” he says, “But I could quit today.” He immediately regrets his sleep-deprived honesty. He sounds as desperate as he is, and that’s not attractive.

Phil doesn’t seem put off by it. “Next Tuesday is fine-- we don’t need to get you in trouble.. The first week will be basic stuff, we’ll try to get you up to speed on the studio rules as quickly as possible, since I know you don’t have television experience. We’ll need you in at seven-thirty-- do you need a ride to the studio?” 

“I. Nuh. No, I’ve got it. Seven thirty. Thank you.” 

“Thank you, Bruce. We’re looking forward to working with you. Take care,” Phil says, and then sighs and hangs up as someone starts shouting in the background. 

Bruce puts down the phone gently, staring at the wall. His system is flooding with adrenaline-- what a useful biological response that is, thank you his broken brain associating a very, very good job offer with a crisis. 

He can’t do this right now, can’t panic about all the ways this could go wrong. He doesn’t have time. He has the graveyard tonight and needs to sleep, so he makes himself lie back down in bed and counts sheet metal drill presses in time with his racing heart until he can drift off.

* * *

He should have planned ahead; his last shift was Tuesday swing, and between the two commutes and getting packed up for work he gets about four hours of sleep total, and tries to make it up with orange juice and a vitamin supplement. He’s not going to do caffeine, not unless he has to; he doesn’t like to take the risk with stimulants. 

The bus ride to the studio is spent mostly trying not to hyperventilate and hoping that jeans and a t-shirt are allowable work attire, because his last two checks were rent and groceries, not even all that many groceries, and he hasn’t even had enough in the bank to hit up a Goodwill. He chants a mantra to himself, in time with his pounding heart: _I will not fuck this up._

The little studio is busier in the morning than it was for his late afternoon interview-- there are people going in and out with things, there’s a low-level noise he can hear before he even gets through the door. 

He’s intercepted at the door by the gorgeous redhead from the interview-- Natasha-- who is in these worn jeans that have fitted themselves around her like a second, durable skin, and a black t-shirt. It looks a lot better on her than the business-professional gear from the interview, and he tries not to stare. 

“Uh. Hi.” He wets his lips. “Bruce Banner. Um. Automation.” 

“Natasha Romanoff. Puppeteer and assistant set direction.” Her voice is strangely affectless, and her eyes take him in as if she’s slipping him into place in the tetris-game of the day. She’s nothing like she was in the interview, all bubbles and workplace cheer, and he wonders what that was all about, wonders if he was being tested and how. 

“I know there’s some repair work that needs done, some projects your last engineer left,” he says. “I can start with that?” 

“Yeah. After your quick set tour and a review of our safety protocols, okay?” She nods for him. “And then I’ll let you back in the workshop to go pick up the backlog. We need Fuzzy back in operation soon.” She sounds perfectly casual, and it still feels like he’s being entrusted with a matter of national security. 

No pressure or anything, then. “Okay. Great. Good.”

Shut up, Banner. 

She walks him through the studio quickly, occasionally and without raising her voice telling him to _get out of the way that camera weighs more than you do_ \-- he trails behind her like a duckling and keeps stopping to stare around him. It’s a little humbling to watch these people work, efficient and professional, a few bodies and a lot of wood and canvas turning the little sound stage into a whole fairy tale land in a matter of minutes. 

Natasha guides him along by sheer force of presence, mostly: she doesn’t speak on the set, barely speaks off of it. When she does, it’s terse and only the most critical information: ‘quiet on the set is not so much a direction as a holy law; he’s not allowed up in any of the light riggings; he will help with the light and sound wiring only if asked to; he will not touch the cameras. He wishes he’d brought a notepad. 

“Green room,” she says tersely as they come to a quieter area. “Grab a handful of whatever. We have kids in today so there’s actual food, try not to make a big dent in it, it’s mostly for them. Coffee’s free.” 

“I don’t--” he tries to tell her as she waves him in, and she doesn’t give him a chance to mention that he doesn’t mix well with stimulants.

“Tea’s free, too,” she says, cocking her head sharply at the little coffee nook where a coffee pot sits with a hot plate and an electric kettle, out of reach of small hands. “No official rotation but if you ever want to restock it you’ll make friends. If you want something fancy bring it yourself. Enough to share.” 

“Thank you,” he says meekly. There’s a basket of fruit on the table, for the kids, he reminds himself, but Natasha looks between him and it and gives a sharp nod. After a few seconds of nerve-wracking deliberation he takes a banana. His stomach is already complaining that he’s going to need more than this. He should have had a bigger breakfast, but the cupboards are a little bare. He’ll eat tonight, after he deposits the check from his last job. 

“Workroom is this way.” And then after giving him the toolbox and a quick rundown of his new projects-- a few frayed wires, a remote that’s never worked like it should, a very big very complicated spider that needs a lot of TLC and pieces of an underwater courtroom set with components that have to move a lot more quietly than they do right now-- she abandons him.

He takes a deep breath and sits carefully on a stool, surrounded by strange, delicate things that he needs to fix and not break. There’s sewing to do, too, little cosmetic repairs for puppets that probably fall into his nebulous job description too-- thank god his mother had made sure he knew how before he went off to school. He does some of that first, focusing on small neat stitches to calm his nerves, and then breaks into the remote to try to troubleshoot it.

At lunch, Joe the camera guy comes and invites him to free-for-all takeout-- everyone puts a few bucks in, they get the biggest plate of whatever the chinese place around the corner will give them and a big pack of eggrolls, and call it lunch. 

“Maybe next time--” Bruce starts.

“Nah, come on. You’re new, we’ll pitch in for you.” 

He sits eating lo mein in the company of people who aren’t afraid of him, who seem actually pleased to have him around, and feels... like he could belong here. 

Don’t fuck it up, Banner.

* * *

He’s been working there all of ten days when he fucks it up. He’s back on the same medication and dosage that had been working, sort of, before the new meds that had failed so spectacularly-- and allows himself to forget that his old medications had been working less and less, that’s why he agreed to the trial in the first place. 

His mood comes on slowly; that’s the dangerous kind. When it’s a slow build, he always manages to convince himself he’s got it under control. Yeah, he’s a little ticked off when the bus leaves without him, he’s a little angry at the loud conversation behind him when he does catch the bus, he does feel a little like the guy who accidentally shuts the door in his face did it out of malice, but he’s got it. He’s got it. 

And then one of the sound technicians grabs him a little roughly to pull him off the set and there’s a quiet click in his brain. They’ve been pushing him all morning, and they’re all going to fucking get what’s coming to them. 

He spins on his heel, shoves the sound tech hard enough to knock him on his ass, bellows “Shut the fuck up!” when the man tries to say something. “Don’t fucking touch me, okay? Don’t fucking touch me!” It bubbles up in his head, sudden and implacable, and it’s like a physical pain, like if he doesn’t do _something_ , get the rage out, he’ll crack in half. 

The set goes quietly around him and his face goes into a rictus grin. Oh, did he make a _scene?_ Did they think they could do this to him and not get anything back? Nagging fear, nagging anger in the back of his head, he needs to do something, he can’t let this stay inside him, he’ll die.

Nobody’s coming at him, nobody’s making a move toward him, and then Natasha is stepping out of the back room, quiet and expressionless. 

“Banner,” she says matter of factly. “Gotta talk to you.” 

He smirks, distantly and cruelly liking the way she braces her shoulders, and follows her quick steps back off the set and towards the supply closet. 

“In there,” she says, and guides him in, not touching him, taking up a station by the door. 

“So what, we’re just going to stay in here until I’m a good boy again?” 

“Something like that,” she agrees calmly, and flinches very faintly when he spins away to slam a fist into the wall. “Want me to stay?” 

“Go to hell,” he snarls, and she disappears, closing the door with a click. He doesn’t bother to go see if it’s locked, just loses himself in the rage, trying to beat it out of himself, out of the world. 

 

When he comes back out of it, the storeroom is a wreck; one of the shelves is pulled over and one of the cinderblock walls is smeared with blood. His knuckles are a mess, several fingers unable to flex. He can’t really feel the pain yet, or hear much over the rush of blood in his ears, but he knows soon it’s going to start to hurt. 

None of the cleaning supplies in here were caustic enough to burn himself with, and that almost has to be intentional. The whole thing. Natasha knew what she was doing, she took him somewhere where there wasn’t much to hurt, nothing expensive to break; someplace as safe as it could be around him. All the shelves but the one are bolted up against the walls, no heavy tools, no sharp objects. Most of the mess is actually from shredded industrial-sized packages of paper towels, and his own blood. 

Set protocol, you have to fill out paperwork for bodily fluids. His head is starting to hurt, tender when he touches it-- he hasn’t torn out hair this time, but there are bruises on his face and arms and at least one or two fingers feel broken.

The depression that always follows an episode starts to settle in. He’s fucked. He’s fucked. He doesn’t know how he’s going to apologize to the sound technician-- to Natasha, amazing Natasha. Phil. Phil _trusted_ him. 

That more than anything makes him want to curl up and wait to die. The level of trust all these people had shown him, how far out of their way they’d all gone to make things okay for him. 

He just stands there for a while, exhausted, and then picks up a few stray paper towels and wraps them like mittens around his bleeding fingers so he can stop making such a mess. It hurts when he tries to open the door-- he hisses and tries again, and then a third time, and then there’s a knock. 

“Need a hand in there?” 

It’s not Phil, which is a relief. It’s Nick, which seems fitting. He’s a fantastic bad-cop to Phil’s fatherly-cop. 

“Yeah,” he says, and steps back so that the door can open. 

Nick fills the doorway like a one-man wall; Bruce is a little surprised when he steps away to let him out. He glances down at the reddening paper towels around his hands. 

“Banner, did you not think we had enough paperwork?” 

“I’m sorry, sir.” Bruce doesn’t want to meet his eyes; does, because he really doesn’t deserve to feel sorry for himself right now. 

Nick grunts at him and steps inside to take in the mess he’s made, making a low growl of irritation at what he sees. “This wasn’t good, Banner.” 

“No, sir.” It just seems to come out; even without knowing that Fury was in the military with Phil-- still is, in fact-- it just seems appropriate. 

Fury draws in a breath, lets it back out in a rush, and turns to him. 

“Don’t call me sir, Banner, I work for a living. By the way, Charlie is fine, you’d better be happy to know.” 

The sound tech. Bruce jerks a nod. “Yes.” Sir, he manages not to add. Barely. 

“We’ve talked about your little episode. We were aware this was a risk when you signed on, so nobody’s going to act shocked that you exploded. However.” Fury draws himself up to his full height, which is actually extremely intimidating. “This is not baseball, Banner. You don’t get three. You’re lucky we’re giving you this one-- on the full agreement of everyone involved, so I expect you to show a whole lot of gratitude to your colleagues in the days to come. But you are now on probation, indefinite.” He swings a hand at the mess on the floor. “This? Is acceptable. It is not amusing, it is not desirable, it had better not become a _habit_. But if you feel that you have no other choice, we can fix shelves.” Fury points to the blood smears. “ _That_ , on the other hand. And what you did to Charlie? Does not happen again. At such time as it does happen again, we will bounce you out onto the pavement where the police will collect you because we _will_ be pressing charges.” 

Bruce nods, and if he weren’t so tired, so burnt out, he thinks he might just start crying.

“Now. Natasha will be driving you to the hospital. Get your fingers fixed. I do not want you back in this studio until you’ve talked to your counselor and when you do I want a full report, is that clear?” 

“Yeah,” he whispers, and stands frozen there until Natasha comes to take him to the hospital. 

She lets him apologize over and over on the drive there, gives a flat little “okay,” and nothing else, dropping him off outside the ER without a word.

Slow Tuesday in the ER; they see him fairly quickly, if only to keep him from bleeding on things. It turns out that only one finger is actually broken; the rest are relatively simple dislocations, reset and splinted cleanly. It isn’t cheap, but it isn’t going to ruin him--if he can live on ramen for a while he can slowly start chipping away at it, and still make rent. ...and they’ll have to up the dose of his meds, that’s going to gouge a little more out of his budget. But he’s gotten fond of ramen. Many happy childhood memories revolve around it. 

He’s so wrapped up in his own head as he leaves that doesn’t notice Natasha in the waiting room, and she has to run out after him and catch him halfway to the hospital shuttle that goes out to the transit center. 

“C’mon. I’ll give you a ride.” She matches stride with him, sort of herding him towards the parking structure without actually touching him 

“...why?” he asks, bewildered. 

She shrugs. “Life sucks sometimes.” 

That seems to be all he’s going to get. But it’s more than he’s gotten in his entire adult life. He trails after her, tucks into her car and curls up in the passenger seat. He thinks it might be the safest place he could possibly be, right now, and it’s a little bit of comfort that he carries with him home and into a painkiller induced sleep.


	3. Equilibrium

Phil watches Bruce with a protective eye as the weeks and then the months go on. He tries to stay out of his new employee’s way and squash the impulse to mother him. Which is strong. He settles on just... mentoring him, occasionally offering him a shoulder. 

Bruce does start to open up after a while, starting with occasionally flashing Phil a real smile, cracking a shy joke around the rest of the crew, and then suddenly he’s talking to the puppets and completely in love with the show. It’s startling how fast he melts into the day-to-day as if they’d been waiting for him to fill some integral dynamic.

And as it turns out, job stability helps Bruce’s mental state quite a bit. It isn’t a miracle cure: he has two more bad attacks, maybe three months apart. But these are manageable- they aren’t as bad as the first one, and he’s got enough trust in his coworkers now to tell them when he’s having a bad day. Both times he has enough advance warning to give Natasha a terse message and get away from everyone to take it out on the architecture and the odd roll of paper towels. 

The second attack has several days of advanced notice, because it’s after his doctor switches him to a new medication-- it fails spectacularly, sending him into a downward spiral until he can get back on his old stuff-- Bruce confesses that it was a similar reaction that led to the bar brawl that got him expelled. 

“I don’t tell people about it. Or about Brian,” Bruce says. Bruce never calls the man ‘my father’. Phil is developing quite the loathing-by-proxy for the abusive jerk. “Because it’s not an excuse.”

“No,” Phil agrees. “But ‘not an excuse’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘not important.’” 

Bruce looks at him, exhausted and miserable, his hands red and cross-hatched with band-aids from attacking the brick wall outside the building. They’re just bruised, a little scraped; he hasn’t really hurt himself since the first time, and Phil is relieved and very, very proud of him. “...thank you.” 

“Of course,” Phil says, and hugs him. A manly one-arm-around back-pat that’s all Bruce seems to be able to take, but he smiles wanly at Phil and one-arms back. 

That’s the last of the big blow-ups, and he’s on a year-long clean streak when Phil asks a visiting professor at NYU to come do a guest spot about women in the field of science. She’d been an undergrad at Culver, so Phil mentions Bruce very casually to make sure there’s no bad blood, and he’s pleasantly surprised when her eyes light up. 

Dr. Ross (‘Betty’s fine!’) apparently dated Bruce through college, casual and friendly-- they drifted apart when she got accepted to Purdue and he stayed at Culver. Bruce is happy to see her, too-- his eyes light up as brightly as Betty's had, and don’t dim much when he notices the ring on her left hand, and Phil thinks they'll be just fine. 

Phil eventually meets Betty’s husband Leonard, whose name she did not take in a very modern 90’s kind of way, and likes him fine. He’s very sincere. He likes Bruce, which lifts him in Phil’s esteem. 

The show goes on and they tackle hell and the hereafter and the terrifying, amazing, euphoric exhausting move from public access to syndication and at some point everyone starts to notice that either Betty or Leonard is dropping Bruce off in the morning and that this has been going on for a while. 

Phil isn’t sure what’s going on until he accidentally stumbles on Bruce kissing Betty goodbye. It’s a very involved kiss, and he’s able to back away without being noticed. In fact, he might have been able to come through with a marching band. 

He has no idea what to make of that, so he spills out his worries to Natasha over beer. 

“This isn’t like him. He wouldn’t hurt someone like this.” 

“No, he wouldn’t,” she agrees with a hum, and doesn’t say anything more about it until the next time Leonard drops him off at work and she drags Phil into a broom closet so they can watch him kiss Leonard goodbye. Which he does with an enthusiasm that makes Phil blush up to his ears. 

Bruce catches them sneaking out of the broom closet when he comes back from seeing Leonard out the door, and his eyes go saucer-wide and frightened.

They talk past each other in stammers for a few minutes until they can sort out that a) it’s Natasha’s fault, Phil isn’t much of a spy, and b) it seems that Phil’s military background had somehow completely blinded Bruce to the fact that he’s not exactly in the closet anymore, and Bruce hasn’t been in the club scene to understand what it implies when Natasha talks about wild nights at the Midnight Mile. 

“Oh,” Bruce says, when Phil explains. “Um. I’m not, I don’t want you to think ashamed? About being with a guy. I just know this isn’t usual, Betty and Len and me. But.” 

“Are you happy?” Phil asks. “Are you an equal partner in this?”

Bruce smiles shyly, and nods. “We’re very happy.” 

“Then I’m happy for you.” And Phil stops worrying. It’s a very busy year and Bruce is content and eating well and there’s a lot to do. 

A year and a half goes by, and the show lurches, grows, manages not to die in syndication, and gains audience numbers that make Phil’s eyes pop. The sets start to get bigger, the cast and crew expands and Phil actually starts delegating interviews. 

Nick also gets a promotion that comes with mandatory training and a station far away, and Phil’s so distracted by trying not to let it get him down that he doesn’t notice something’s wrong with Bruce. He’s hiding it well-- he’s built himself up to being able to fake a good day with the rest of them. He can’t fool Natasha, though, who tips off Phil, and once Phil knows what to look for he can see that their engineer is in a very bad way. 

He follows Bruce when he slips into the supply closet over a coffee break. 

Bruce isn't hitting things; he’s just sitting on the floor with his back to the wall and his legs limply in front of him.

“Bruce?” Phil kneels next to him. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“Don’t know,” he says. 

“What’s happened?” 

“Betty and Leonard,” Bruce says, throat tightening around the words. 

_Do I have to have someone kill them?_ Phil tries not to say, and manages to ask “What happened?” instead.  
.  
Apparently his poker face failed him this time, because Bruce shakes his head. "It’s not like that. They didn’t-- it’s me. It’s not them," he says dully. “We just, we were talking about plans. Where we want to be in ten years.” 

Phil nods for him to go on, and because Bruce has come to trust Phil on a level that humbles him, he does. 

“...they both want a family. So bad, Phil. They really want kids.” Bruce looks down at his lap, face twisting, hands wringing. “And it’s not even. They were ready for me to be there for that. You’d think they’d want to have a normal household, if they were going to have kids, but they were- wanted me to be a dad. For the kids to be our kids. And I can’t.” He shakes his head, sudden and hard. eyes welling up. “I can’t. Do that to a kid, I can’t go punch walls when it’s my own son or daughter, I don’t want-- I was so afraid of my father-- I can’t.” 

“I understand,” Phil soothes, heart breaking a little for him, the kid he was and the man he is. “I understand, Bruce, I do.” 

“They were so understanding,” Bruce spills out. “I sound like such an asshole, they were so understanding about it, Len said they could wait. Until I was ready. But I won’t be. I can’t do that to them, I can’t take that away from them. So I made a decision. We made a decision. Together.” 

He takes a shaking breath. “And I know they’re going to be. Great parents.” 

Phil knows this must be hard on Betty and Leonard, too, but right now they can go to hell. He wraps his arms around Bruce and this time Bruce melts into the embrace, eyes wet and leaking onto his suit jacket, sobbing it out against him. 

They’ve come so far from the first skittish, standoffish days; Bruce leans on the crew, unashamedly accepts drinks and nights out to distract him, even lets Phil and Natasha and a few lighting guys come help him move out two weeks later. 

He doesn’t have much to take with him to his new place, but the Samson-Ross home somehow feels like it’s missing something fundamental when the last of Bruce's things goes out the door. Phil looks away and busies himself with a box of textbooks while the three of them hug their goodbyes, promising that they’ll keep in contact, that they’ll still see plenty of each other, holding each other like none of them believe it. 

It would have been easier if it had been a bad break, somehow, if there’d been someone to blame. It doesn’t seem fair that three people so happy together can’t make it work somehow, but Phil’s been there. Sometimes love doesn’t conquer all. 

For his part he simply promises Betty that she’s still welcome on the show, and hugs her goodbye to reassure her that he doesn’t blame her. He does, in some small mean part of him, but he knows it’s irrational and it will pass. 

The crew drags Bruce out to Thai food when it’s all over, plying him with sweet iced tea and beer. Natasha gets too drunk to drive home-- so she swears, but Phil’s seen her walk a straight line after heroic doses of vodka before, and the beer wasn’t all that strong. He doesn’t say anything, though, so she winds up staying the night on Bruce’s couch anyway. 

It’s touch and go for a few weeks, but Bruce is stronger than he realized, than even Phil did. He manages. He doesn’t relapse, and while they can tell he’s hurting, at least he’s hurting with family. 

“We made a good call,” Natasha observes, watching Bruce fixing something for Joe the camera guy. 

“I think so.” Phil pauses, hesitant to drop another bomb just as things are getting back to normal, no matter how relatively small said bomb is. “We just got a resume from Tony Stark for the new engineering position.” 

“Oh god,” says Natasha with a faint and profound horror, and life goes chaotically on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! Until Tony shows back up, if life cooperates enough to let me write that one too. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
